A compelling, comic-book–ish action-thriller in which life’s new inevitables are death, taxes, and a gruesome post-mortem...
In a future where reanimated human corpses are an invaluable slave-labor force, government agent/hacker Jonah Adams searches for his kidnapped lover and discovers the ghastly secret of the zombie trade.
Nobody uses the z-word in Dallaire’s smart, slick, occasionally overcranked kickoff to a new sci-fi series. The term instead is “shade” for a dead person reanimated by a high-tech government serum and reprogrammed as an obedient, superstrong, and durable (if slowly decomposing) automaton. Due to debt and punitive fines in the community, the “shade trade” creates a hellish new paradigm in which individuals who die owing money can be forcibly revived as ambulatory cadavers to work off their debts for decades, even centuries. And nobody gets hurt…right? Hero Jonah Adams is a somewhat tainted military hacker/commando now working as a “ghoul” for the Incorporeal Revenue Service, reanimating the worst tax debtors and criminals as walking-dead slave laborers. But his disapproving girlfriend, Vanessa, is an activist attorney working to curtail the grisly system. When Vanessa vanishes under ominous circumstances, Adams risks his life (and afterlife) to locate her and penetrate shrouds of secrecy, lethal cybertraps, powerful interplanetary corporations, and treacherous AIs. After a gut-grabbing opener, readers expecting George Romero–style zombie action may be surprised that the expected brain-eating armies of rotting undead are often eclipsed by cyberpunk action and digital avatars casting dangerous computer-code spells. Author Dallaire’s métier is evidently in video game strategy guides, and his debut is more a series of “boss fights” than, say, Blade Runner think pieces.
A compelling, comic-book–ish action-thriller in which life’s new inevitables are death, taxes, and a gruesome post-mortem payment plan.Pub Date: April 2, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9961811-0-5
Page Count: 328
Publisher: If Tales
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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